Reading over this week’s topic in my CIS 608 class and the
fact that my parents just called me about needing a new wireless router for
their house brought to mind the topic of wireless security. Although a few of the best practices that I
have been using for years came to mind such as changing the default passwords
and using WPA2 security, I thought I would do a quick internet search to see what
some experts say are ways that you should secure your wireless network. The search netted varying articles with
different opinions but the one that I found to be interesting was the article
by Samara Lynn of PCMag.com called “5 Ways to Secure Your Wireless Router”. The
article can be viewed at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409751,00.asp.
The five ways that the article tells users they should
secure their wireless network are:
1.
Password Encryption using WPA2 security
2.
Turn off SSID broadcasting
3.
Disable guest networks
4.
MAC Filtering
5.
Get a network monitoring app
All of these suggested protections seem to be pretty basic
to me. Although I do not utilize all of
these methods of protection I can see definite value in following these
suggestions. The only protection that I
don’t currently run is MAC address filtering.
That is primarily because this is a very inconvenient thing for me to do
with the constant influx of new devices that require access into my
network. I may again someday re-enable
MAC filtering but as for now I don’t do this.
Some other measures that I personally have run on wireless networks are
to run extremely long passphrases for the security password. Typically the phrase will consist of letters,
numbers and special characters and be at least 50 characters. Although there are many different protections
out there for wireless networks it is important for users to protect them using
suggestions such as the advice given in this article in order to secure their
network.
